HALF OF JAWS SUCCESS DUE TO JOHN WILLIAMS SCORE SAYS SPIELBERG

Steven Spielberg attributes 50% of the success of Jaws to the John Williams score.

Quite right too. It does for swimming pools and the sea what Bernard Herrmann's Psycho did for showers and people wielding knives.

Those two alternating notes - E and F or F and F sharp - represented something primal and relentless in the shark and our fear in Jaws.

It's a far cry from when John Williams first played the Jaws score for Spielberg, he laughed. That's right, the young director thought that Williams was pulling his leg, which is somewhat ironic as that is what the shark would end up doing to the estuary victim.

Spielberg thought he was going to get something other worldly and grandiose, and initially laughed at the repeated notes presented to him.

Of course, by the time it came to the finished film, Spielberg had a very different opinion of the seminal score that delivers thrills, chills and excitement to this day.

Spielberg had the following to say on the original Jaws LPs linear notes.

"In doing the score for Jaws...John Williams has really outdone himself. The soundtrack is a stunning symphonic achievement and a great leap ahead in the revitalization of film music as a foreground component for the total motion picture experience...He has made our movie music more adventurous, gripping and phobic than I ever thought possible."

And that was a position Williams would go on to quickly solidify with the likes of Star Wars just two years later, and with Superman the year after that. The words and images are impossible to separate from those rousing, pivotal scores that are, and even transcend, the very essence and feelings of those films.

That's why our record, CD or online collections are full of John Williams, why we go to hear concerts of his work, why we pay to hear an orchestra play his music as it unfolds live to the film that already sits on our shelf.

The music of John Williams matters and continues to matter. His symphonic sound is ageless, yet only becomes more appreciated with age.

Steven Spielberg added: "Being an insatiable collector of film music, I haven't been this happy with a soundtrack since Dimitri Tiomkin's The Guns of Navarone. What more can I say? The music fulfilled a vision we all shared."

Words by Dean Newman

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